Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 16

Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 16

This youth, with "azure-grey eyes that lighted up like the windows of Solomon's Temple," was from his childhood possessed of a most acutely sensitive and suggestible psychical disposition. He always felt that the real world was deeper than the one which he saw with his senses, and he was frequently swept from within by mighty currents which he could not trace to any well-mapped region of the domain of Nature. His vivid and pictorial imagination, his consciousness of inrushes from the unplumbed deeps within, and his inclination to solitude and meditation are well in evidence at an early age, and we have no difficulty at all in seeing that his psychological equilibrium was unstable, and that he was capable of sudden shifts of inward level.

The first sign of his psychical peculiarity comes to light in an incident of his early childhood. While he was tending cattle in the fields one day he climbed alone a neighbouring {157} mountain-peak, and on the summit he espied among the great red sandstones a kind of aperture overgrown with bushes. Boy-like he entered the opening, and there within, in a strange vault, he descried a large portable vessel full of money. The sight of it made him shudder, and, without touching the treasure, he made his way out to the world again. To his surprise he was never able to find the aperture again, though, in company with the other less imaginative cowboys, he often hunted for it. His friend, von Franckenberg, who relates the story and says that he had it from Boehme's mouth, thinks that the experience was "a sort of emblematic omen or presage of his future spiritual admission to the sight of the hidden treasury of the wisdom and mysteries of G.o.d and Nature,"[14] but we are more interested in it as a revelation of the extraordinary psychical nature of the boy, with his tendency to hallucination.

When he was in his fourteenth year he was apprenticed to a shoemaker in Seidenberg, and devoted himself diligently to the mastery of his trade.

It was during this period of apprenticeship, which lasted three years, that there was granted to him "a kind of secret tinder and glimmer" of coming fame. One day a stranger, plain and mean in dress, but otherwise of good presence, came to the shop and asked to buy a pair of shoes. As the master shoemaker was absent, the uninitiated prentice-boy did not feel competent to sell the shoes, but the buyer would not be put off. Thereupon young Jacob set an enormous price upon them, hoping to stave off the trade. The man, however, without any demur paid the price, took the shoes, and went out. Just outside the door the stranger stopped, and in a serious tone called out, "Jacob, come hither to me!" The man, with shining eyes looking him full in the face, took his hand and said, "Jacob, thou art little but thou shalt become great--a man very different from the common cast, so that thou shalt be a wonder to the world. Be a good lad; fear G.o.d and reverence His Word." With a little more counsel, the {158} stranger pressed his hand and went his way, leaving the boy amazed.[15]

He had, his intimate biographer tells us, lived from his very youth up in the fear of G.o.d, in all humility and simplicity, and had taken peculiar pleasure in hearing sermons, but from the opening of his apprenticeship he began to revolt from the endless controversies and "scholastic wranglings about religion," and he withdrew into himself, fervently and incessantly praying and seeking and knocking, until one day "he was translated into the holy Sabbath and glorious Day of Rest to the soul," and, according to his own words, was "enwrapt with the Divine Light for the s.p.a.ce of seven days and stood possessed of the highest beatific wisdom of G.o.d, in the ecstatic joy of the Kingdom."[16] Boehme looked upon this "Sabbatic" experience as his spiritual call, and from this time on he increased his endeavours to live a pure life of G.o.dliness and virtue, refusing to listen to frivolous talk, reproving his fellows and even his shopmaster when they indulged in light and wanton conversation, until finally the master discharged him with the remark that he did not care to keep "a house-prophet" any longer.[17] Hereupon he went forth as a travelling cobbler, spending some years in his wanderings, discovering more and more, as he pa.s.sed from place to place, how religion was being lost in the Babel of theological wrangling, and seeing, with those penetrating eyes of his, deeper into the meaning of life and the world. Near the end of the century--probably about 1599--he gave up his wanderings, married Catherine Kunchman, "a young woman of virtuous disposition,"

and opened a shoemaker's shop for himself in the town of Gorlitz, where he soon established a reputation for honest, faithful work, and where he modestly prospered and was able to buy a home of his own, and where he reared the four sons and two daughters who came to the happy home.

{159}

The supreme experience of his life--and one of the most remarkable instances of "illumination" in the large literature of mystical experiences--occurred when Boehme was twenty-five years of age, some time in the year 1600. His eye fell by chance upon the surface of a polished pewter dish which reflected the bright sunlight, when suddenly he felt himself environed and penetrated by the Light of G.o.d, and admitted into the innermost ground and centre of the universe. His experience, instead of waning as he came back to normal consciousness, on the contrary deepened. He went to the public green in Gorlitz, near his house, and there it seemed to him that he could see into the very heart and secret of Nature, and that he could behold the innermost properties of things.[18] In his own account of his experience, Boehme plainly indicates that he had been going through a long and earnest travail of soul as a Seeker,[19] "striving to find the heart of Jesus Christ and to be freed and delivered from everything that turned him away from Christ." At last, he says, he resolved to "put his life to the utmost hazard" rather than miss his life-quest, when suddenly the "gate was opened." He continues his account as follows: "In one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together in a University. . . . I saw and knew the Being of Beings, the Byss and Abyss, the eternal generation of the Trinity, the origin and descent of this world, and of all creatures through Divine Wisdom.

I knew and saw in myself all the three worlds--(1) the Divine, Angelical, or Paradisaical World; (2) the dark world, the origin of fire; and (3) the external, visible world as an outbreathing or expression of the internal and spiritual worlds. I saw, too, the essential nature of evil and of good, and how the {160} pregnant Mother--the eternal genetrix--brought them forth."[20]

He has also vividly told his experience in the _Aurora_: "While I was in affliction and trouble, I elevated my spirit, and earnestly raised it up unto G.o.d, as with a great stress and onset, lifting up my whole heart and mind and will and resolution to wrestle with the love and mercy of G.o.d and not to give over unless He blessed me--then the Spirit did break through. When in my resolved zeal I made such an a.s.sault, storm, and onset upon G.o.d, as if I had more reserves of virtue and power ready, with a resolution to hazard my life upon it, suddenly my spirit did break through the Gate, not without the a.s.sistance of the Holy Spirit, and I reached to the innermost Birth of the Deity and there I was embraced with love as a bridegroom embraces his bride. My triumphing can be compared to nothing but the experience in which life is generated in the midst of death or like the resurrection from the dead. In this Light my spirit suddenly saw through all, and in all created things, even in herbs and gra.s.s, I knew G.o.d--who He is, how He is, and what His will is--and suddenly in that Light my will was set upon by a mighty impulse to describe the being of G.o.d."[21]

This experience was the momentous watershed of his life. He is constantly referring to it either directly or indirectly. "I teach, write, and speak," is his frequent testimony, "of what has been wrought in me. I have not sc.r.a.ped my teaching together out of histories and so made _opinions_. I have by G.o.d's grace obtained eyes of my own."[22]

"There come moments," he writes, "when the soul sees G.o.d as in a flash of lightning,"[23] and he tells his readers that "when the Gate is opened" to them, they also "will understand."[24] "In my own faculties," he writes again, "I am as blind a man as {161} ever was, but in the Spirit of G.o.d my spirit sees through all."[25]

During the ten quiet years which followed "the opening of the Gate" to him, Boehme meditated on what he had seen, and, though he does not say so, he almost certainly read much in the works of "the great masters,"

as he calls them, who were trying to tell, often in confused language, the central secret of the universe. Instead of fading out, his "flash"

of insight grew steadily clearer to him as he read and pondered, and little by little, as one comes to see in the dark, certain great ideas became defined. With his third "flash,"[26] which came to him in 1610, when he felt once more "overshadowed by the Holy Spirit and touched by G.o.d,"[27] he was moved to write down for his own use what he had seen.

"It was," he says, "powerfully borne in upon my mind to write down these things for a memorial, however difficult they might be of apprehension to my outer self [intellect] and of expression through my pen. I felt compelled to begin at once, like a child going to school, to work upon this very great Mystery. Inwardly [in spirit] I saw it all well enough, as in a great depth; for I looked through as into a chaos where all things lie [undifferentiated] but the unravelling thereof seemed impossible. From time to time an opening took place within me, _as of a growth_.[28] I kept this to myself for twelve years [1600-12], being full of it and I experienced a vehement impulse before I could bring it out into expression; but at last it overwhelmed me like a cloud-burst which hits whatever it lights upon. And so it went with me: whatsoever I could grasp sufficiently to bring it out, that I wrote down."[29]

This first book which thus grew out of his spiritual travails and "openings" Boehme called _Morning Glow_, to which later, through the suggestion of a friend, he gave {162} the t.i.tle _Aurora_. It is a strange _melange_ of chaos where all things lie undifferentiated and of insight; dreary wastes of words that elude comprehension, with beautiful patches of spiritual oasis. He himself always felt that the book was dictated to him, and that he only pa.s.sively held the pen which wrote it. "Art," he says, speaking of his writing, "has not written here, neither was there any time to consider how to set it down punctually, according to the understanding of the letters, but all was ordered according to the direction of the Spirit, which often went in haste, so that in many words letters may be wanting, and in some places a capital letter for a word; so that _the Penman's hand_, by reason that he was not accustomed to it, did often shake. And though I could have wrote in a more accurate, fair, and plain manner, yet the reason was this, that the burning fire often forced forward with speed, and the hand and pen must hasten directly after it; for it goes and comes like a sudden shower."[30] This is obviously an inside account of the production of inspirational script, amounting almost to automatic impulsion. Throughout his voluminous writings he often speaks of "this hand," or "this pen" as though they were owned and moved by a will far deeper than his own individual consciousness,[31] and his writings themselves frequently bear the marks of automatisms.

His ma.n.u.script copy of _Morning Glow_ was freely lent to readers and circulated widely. Boehme himself kept no copy by him, but he tells us that during its wanderings the ma.n.u.script was copied out in full four times by strangers and brought to him.[32] One of the copies fell into the hands of Gregorius Richter, pastor primarius of Gorlitz, a violent guardian of orthodoxy and a man extremely jealous of any infringement of the dignity of his official position. He proceeded at once--"without sufficient examination or knowledge"--to {163} "vilify and condemn" the writing, and in a sermon on "False Prophets" he vigorously attacked the local prophet of Gorlitz, who meekly sat in Church and listened to the "fulminations" against him.[33] After the sermon, Boehme modestly asked the preacher to show him what was wrong with his teaching, but the only answer he received was that if he did not instantly leave the town the pastor would have him arrested; and the following day Richter had Boehme summoned before the magistrates, and succeeded by his influence and authority in overawing them so that they ordered the harmless prophet to leave the town forthwith without any time given him to see his family or to close up his affairs.

Boehme quietly replied, "Yes, dear Sirs, it shall be done; since it cannot be otherwise I am content." The next day, however, the magistrates of Gorlitz held a meeting and recalled the banished prophet and offered him the privilege of remaining in his home and occupation on condition that he would cease from writing on theological matters.

On this latter point we have Boehme's own testimony, though he does not refer the condition to the magistrates. "When I appeared before him"

[Pastor Richter], Boehme says, "to defend myself and indicate my standpoint, the Rev. Primarius [Richter] exacted from me a promise to give up writing and to this I a.s.sented, since I did not then see clearly the divine way, nor did I understand what G.o.d would later do with me. . . . By his order I gave up for many years [1613-18] all writing or speaking about my knowledge of divine things, hoping vainly that the evil reports would at last come to an end, instead of which they only grew worse and more malignant."[34]

Boehme's friend, Doctor Cornelius Weissner, in his account, which is none too accurate, endeavours to find an explanation of Richter's persistent hate and persecution {164} of the shoemaker-prophet in a gentle reproof which the latter administered to the former for having meanly treated a poor kinsman of Boehme in a small commercial transaction, but it is by no means necessary to bring up incidents of this sort to discover an adequate ground for Richter's fury. The _Aurora_ itself furnishes plenty of pa.s.sages which would, if read, throw a jealous guardian of orthodoxy into fierce activity. One pa.s.sage in which Boehme boldly attacks the popular doctrine of predestination and a.s.serts that the writers and scribes who teach it are "masterbuilders of Lies" will be sufficient ill.u.s.tration of the theological provocation: "This present world doth dare to say that G.o.d hath decreed or concluded it so in His predestinate purpose and counsel that some men should be saved and some should be d.a.m.ned, as if h.e.l.l and malice and evil had been from eternity and that it was in G.o.d's predestinate purpose that men should be and must be therein. Such persons pull and hale the Scriptures to prove it, though, indeed, they neither have the knowledge of the true G.o.d nor the understanding of Scripture. These justifiers and disputers a.s.sist the Devil steadfastly and pervert G.o.d's truth and change it into lies."[35] He closed his book with these daring words: "Should Peter or Paul seem to have written otherwise, then look to the essence, look to the heart [_i.e._ to interior meaning]. If you lay hold of the heart of G.o.d you have ground enough."[36] His entire conception of salvation was, too, as we shall see, vastly different from the prevailing orthodox conception, and furthermore he was only a layman, innocent of the schools, and yet he was claiming to speak as an almost infallible instrument of a fresh revelation of G.o.d. Theologians of the type of the Primarius Richter need no other provocation to account for their relentless pursuit of local prophets that appear in the domain of their authority.

Meantime Boehme's fame was slowly spreading, and he was drawing into sympathetic fellowship with himself a number of high-minded and serious men who were {165} dissatisfied with the current orthodox teaching. In this group of friends who found comfort in the fresh message of Boehme were Dr. Balthazar Walther, director of the Chemical Laboratory of Dresden, Dr. Tobias Kober, physician at Gorlitz, a disciple of Paracelsus, Abraham von Franckenberg, who calls Jacob "our G.o.d-taught man," Doctor Cornelius Weissner, who became intimate with him in 1618, and the n.o.bleman Carl von Endern, who copied out the entire ma.n.u.script of the _Aurora_. These friends frequently encouraged Boehme to break his enforced silence, and he himself was restless and melancholy, feeling that he was "entrusted with a talent which he ought to put to usury and not return to G.o.d singly and without improvement, like the lazy servant." "It was with me," he writes, describing his years of silence, "as when a seed is hidden in the earth. It grows up in storm and rough weather, against all reason. In winter time, all is dead, and reason says: 'It is all over with it.' But the precious seed within me sprouted and grew green, oblivious of all storms, and amid disgrace and ridicule it has blossomed forth into a lily!"[37]

Under the pressure, from without and from within, he resolved after five years of repression to break the seal of silence and give the world his message. Writing to a dear friend, whom he called "a plant of G.o.d," he says: "My very dear brother in the life of G.o.d, you are more acceptable to me in that it was you who awaked me out of my sleep, that I might go on to bring forth fruit in the life of G.o.d--and I want you to know that after I was awakened _a strong smell was given to me in the life of G.o.d_."[38] During the next six years (1618-24) he wrote almost incessantly, producing, from 1620 on, book after book in rapid succession.[39] In 1622, he informs a friend that he {166} has "laid aside his trade to serve G.o.d and his brothers,"[40] and in 1623, he says that he has written without ceasing during the autumn and winter.

He felt throughout his life that the "illumination," which broke upon him in the year 1600, steadily increased with the years, and he came to look upon his first book as only the crude attempt of a child as compared with his later works. "The Day," he writes in 1620, "has now overtaken the _Aurora_ [the morning glow]; it has grown full daylight and the morning is extinguished."[41] He says, with artlessness, that when he wrote the _Aurora_, he was not yet accustomed to the Spirit.

The heavenly joy, indeed, met him and he followed the Spirit's guidance, but much of his own wild and untamed nature still remained to mar his work. Each successive book marks a growth of "the spiritual lily" in him, he thinks: "Each book from the first is ten times deeper!"[42]

Once again, the zeal of a friend brought Boehme into the storm-centre of persecution. Until 1623, his works circulated only in ma.n.u.script and were kept from the eye of his ecclesiastical enemy, but toward the end of that year, an admirer, Sigismund von Schweinitz, printed three of his little books--_True Repentance_; _True Resignation_; and _The Supersensual Life_--in one volume under the t.i.tle _The Way to Christ_.

Richter was immediately aroused and poured forth his feelings in some desperately bad verses:

Quot continentur lineae, blasphemiae Tot continentur in libro sutorio, Qui nil nisi picem redolet sutoriam,

{167}

Atrum et colorem, quern vocant sutorium.

Pfuy! pfuy! teter sit fetor a n.o.bis procul![43]

But the Primarius was not content with this harmless weapon of ridicule. He stirred up the neighbouring clergymen to join him in the attack, and a complaint was lodged in Town Council against Boehme as a "rabid enthusiast," and he was warned to leave the town. Boehme was as sweet and gentle in spirit now as he had been ten years before. He wrote in 1624: "I pray for those who have reviled and condemned me.

They curse me and I bless. I am standing the test ["Proba"] and have the mark of Christ on my forehead."[44] But he thought that it did not befit him as an instrument of G.o.d's revelation to let the false charges against him go unanswered. He accordingly replied to the accusations in an _Apology_, in which the whole depth and beauty of his spiritual nature breathes forth. His appeal was in vain and he was forced to leave Gorlitz. He went forth, however, in no discouraged mood. He saw that his message was "being sounded through Europe," and he predicts that "the nations will take up what his own native town is casting away. Already, he hears, his book has been read with interest in the Court of the Elector of Saxony, and he writes, March 15, 1624: "I am invited there to a conference with high people and I have consented to go at the end of the Leipzig fair. Soon the revelation of Jesus Christ shall break forth and destroy the works of the Devil."[45] The real trouble with the world, he thinks, is that the Christians in it are t.i.tular and verbal,"--they are only "opinion-peddlers,"[46] and that is why a man who insists upon a reproduction of the life of Christ is persecuted. The visit to the Elector's Court in Dresden came off well for the simple shoemaker. He spent two months in the home of the court physician, Dr. Hinkelmann, where many of the n.o.bility and clergy came to see {168} him and to talk with him. Three professors of theology and other learned doctors were asked by the Elector to examine him.

They reported that they did not yet quite succeed in understanding him, and that therefore they could not p.r.o.nounce judgment. They hoped "His Highness would please to have patience and allow the man sufficient time to expound his ideas"--which were, in fact, already "expounded" in more than a score of volumes! One of the professors is reported to have said: "I would not for the world be a party to this man's condemnation," and another declared: "Nor would I, for who knows what lies at the bottom of it all!"[47]

The end of the good man's life, however, was near. He was taken ill in November 1624, while staying with his old friend, von Schweinitz, and he hurried home to Gorlitz, where his family had remained during his absence, to die in the quiet of his own house. The night before he died, he spoke of hearing beautiful music, and asked to have the door opened that he might hear it better. In the morning--as the _Aurora_ appeared--he bade farewell to his wife and children, committed his soul to the crucified Lord Jesus Christ, arranged a few simple matters, and, with a smile on his face, said, "Now I go to Paradise."

His old enemy, Richter, had died a few months before him, but the new pastor was of the same temper and refused to preach his funeral sermon.

The second pastor of the city was finally ordered by the Governor of Lausitz to preach the sermon, which he began with the words, "I had rather have walked a hundred and twenty miles than preach this sermon!"[48] The common people, however,--the shoemakers, tanners and a "great concourse of us his fast friends," as one of them writes,--were at the funeral, and a band of young shoemakers carried his body to its last resting-place, where a block of porphyry now informs the visitor that "Jacob Boehme, _philosophus Teutonicus_"

sleeps beneath.

Grutzmacher holds that Boehme is an "isolated thinker," having little, if any, historical connection with {169} the past.[49] I do not agree with this view. I find in him rather the ripe fulfilment of the powerful protest against the dead letter, against a formal religion, and equally a fulfilment of a Christianity of inward life, which was voiced so vigorously in the writings of Denck, Bunderlin, Entfelder, Franck, and Weigel, neglecting for the moment another side of Boehme and another set of influences which appeared in him. The central note of his life-long prophet-cry was against a form of religion built upon the letter of Scripture and consisting of external ceremonies and practices, and this is the ground of Richter's bitter hostility and stubborn opposition.[50]

The Church of his day seems to him a veritable Babel--"full of pride and wrangling, and jangling, and snarling about the letter of the written Word," lacking in true, real, effectual knowledge and power; a pitiably poor "subst.i.tute for the Temple of the holy Spirit where G.o.d's living Word is taught."[51] Through each of his books we hear of "verbal Christendom"; of "t.i.tular Christians"; of "historical feigned faith"; of "history religion"; of "an external forgiveness of sins"; of "the work of outward letters." "The builders of Babel," he says, "cannot endure that one should teach that Christ Himself must be the teacher in the human heart"--"they jangle instead about the mere husk, about the written word and letter while they miss the living Word."[52]

The divisions of Christendom are due to the fact that its "master-builders" are of the Babel-type. They always follow the line of _opinion_; their basis is "the letter"; their method of approach is _external_. They build "stone houses in which they read the writings which the Apostles left behind them," while they themselves dispute and contend about "mental idols and {170} opinions."[53] The true Church of Christ, on the contrary, is the living Temple of the Spirit. It is built up of men made wholly new by the inward power of the Divine Spirit and made _one_ by an inward unity of heart and life with Christ--as "a living Twig of our Life-Tree Jesus Christ." n.o.body can belong to this Church unless "he puts on the shirt of a little child,"

dies to selfishness and hypocrisy, rises again in a new will and obedience, and forms his life in its inmost ground according to Christ, the Life.[54] "The wise world," he declares, "will not believe in the true inward work of Christ in the heart; it will have only an external washing away of sins in Grace," but the ABC of true religion is far different.[55] He only is a Christian in fact in whom Christ dwelleth, liveth and hath His being, in whom Christ hath arisen as the eternal ground of the soul. He only is a Christian who has this high t.i.tle in himself, and has entered with mind and soul into that Eternal Word which has manifested itself as the life of our humanity.[56] He wrote near the end of his life to Balthazar Tilken: "If I had no other book except the book which I myself am, I should have books enough. The entire Bible lies in me if I have Christ's Spirit in me. What do I need of more books? Shall I quarrel over what is outside me before I have learned what is within me?"[57] "What would it profit me if I were continually quoting the Bible and knew the whole book by heart but did not know the Spirit that inspired the holy men who wrote that book, nor the source from which they received their knowledge? How can I expect to understand them in truth, if I have not the same Spirit they had?"[58]

This insistence on personal, first-hand experience and practice of the Christ-Life, as the ground of true religion, {171} is the fundamental feature of Boehme's Christianity. He travels, as we shall see, through immense heights and deeps. Like Dante, who immeasurably surpa.s.ses him in power of expression, but not in prophetic power of vision, he saw the eternal realities of heaven and h.e.l.l and the world between, and he told as well as he could what he _saw_, but his practical message which runs like a thread through all his writings is always simple--almost childlike in its simplicity--"Thou must thyself be the way. The spiritual understanding must be born in thee."[59] "A Christian is a new creature in the ground of the heart."[60] "The Kingdom of G.o.d is not from without, but it is a new man, who lives in love, in patience, in hope, in faith and in the Cross of Jesus Christ."[61]

And this simple shoemaker of Gorlitz, with his amazing range of thought and depth of experience, practised and embodied the way of life which he recommended. He was a good man, and his life touches us even now with a kind of awe. "Life," he once said, "is a strange bath of thorns and thistles,"[62] and he himself experienced that "bath," but he went through the world hearing everywhere a divine music and "having a joy in his heart which made his whole being tremble and his soul triumph as if it were in G.o.d."[63]

[1] I have used as primary source the German edition of Boehme's Works--_Theosophia revelata_--published in 1730 in 8 vols. All my references are to the English translations made by Sparrow, Ellistone, and Blunden, 1647-61. These translations were republished, 1764, in 4 vols. in an edition which has incorrectly been called William Law's edition. Four volumes have been republished by John M. Watkins of London, as follows: _The Threefold Life of Man_, 1909; _The Three Principles_, 1910; _The Forty Questions_ and _The Clavis_, 1911; and _The Way to Christ_, 1911. The _Signatura rerum_, in English, has been published in "Everyman's Library." A valuable volume of selections from "Jacob Behmen's Theosophic Philosophy" was made by Edward Taylor, London, 1691. Many volumes of selections have been published in recent years. The books on Boehme which I have found most suggestive and helpful are the following: Franz von Baader's "Vorlesungen und Erlauterungen uber J. Bohme's Lehre," _Werke_ (Leipzig, 1852), vol.

iii. [edition of 1855, vol. xiii.]; emile Boutroux, _Le Philosophe allemand_ (Paris, 1888): translated into English by Rothwell in Boutroux's _Historical Studies in Philosophy_ (London, 1912), pp.

169-233; Hans La.s.sen Martensen's _Jacob Boehme_ (translated from the Danish by T. Rhys Evans, London, 1885); Franz Hartmann's _Life and Doctrine of Jacob Boehme_ (London, 1891); Von Harless' _Jacob Boehme und die Alchymisten_ (Leipzig, 1882); Ederheimer's _Jakob Boehme und die Romantiker_ (Heidelberg, 1901); Paul Deussen's _Jacob Boehme_--an Address delivered at Kiel, May 8, 1897--translated from the German by Mrs. D. S. Hehner and printed as Introduction to Watkin's edition of _The Three Principles_ (1910); Christopher Walton's _Notes and Materials for a Biography of William Law_ (London, 1854)--a volume of great value to the student of Boehme; Rudolph Steiner's _Mystics of the Renaissance_ (translated, London, 1911), pp. 223-245; A. J. Penny's _Studies in Jacob Boehme_ (London, 1912), uncritical and written from the theosophical point of view; Hegel's _History of philosophy_ (translated by Haldane and Simson, London, 1895), iii. pp. 188-216.

[2] Aurora, John Sparrow's translation (London, 1656), ii. 79-80.

[3] _Aurora_, iii. 1-3.

[4] _Third Epistle_, 15.

[5] _Aurora_, xiii. 27.

[6] _Ibid._ viii. 19.

[7] _Ibid._ ix 90.

[8] _Ibid._ xiii. 2-4.

[9] _Third Epistle_, 22.

[10] Many thinkers of prominent rank have borne testimony to the greatness of Boehme's genius. I shall mention only a few of these estimates:

"I would recommend you to procure the writings of Boehme and diligently read them. For though I have studied philosophy and theology from my youth . . . yet I must acknowledge that the above writings have been to me of more service for the understanding of the Bible than all my University learning."--"J. G. Gictell, 1698.

"Jacob Boehme, as a religious and philosophical genius, has not often had his equal in the world's history."--"Jacob Boehme: His Life and Philosophy." An Address by Dr. Paul Deussen.